


Lady of the Swans

by ShadowEtienne



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Dol Amroth, Gen, character piece
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-30
Updated: 2016-11-30
Packaged: 2018-09-03 08:32:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8705182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadowEtienne/pseuds/ShadowEtienne
Summary: Lothiriel spent most of her childhood in Dol Amroth looking beyond the edges of her world in hopes that something new or interesting would come to her.  She loved the sea, but adventure and the ability to be helpful drew her first to Minas Tirith.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was mostly a character piece that I wrote to help me get more comfortable with my understanding of Lothiriel because she takes important roles in some of the longer fic that I am preparing myself to get ready to post.

Lothiriel had watched the sea with wonder since she was a young girl.  Strange things came from the sea, some good, some bad, but all interesting and different.  There were merchants from lands far south, or raiders from lands much nearer, but through it all, Dol Amroth remained a working port.  Even as a young child, she had much of the run of the city, for there was not much of anywhere to get lost once she knew the paths, and she wanted to see and learn new things.  She had haunted the steps of her Aunt Ivriniel for weeks on end, pestering her with questions about the working of ships, and it had been some time before she decided that while her Aunt was incredible, she did not also want to be a captain of the fleets of Dol Amroth.  She still loved going down to the harbor to watch their boats come in from training and being useful in fishing, maintaining the harbor, and checking incoming vessels.

She would run messages or errands down to the piers for her father and older brothers and then she would take the long way on the return, winding through markets and listening to things that the people that she passed were saying.  In that way, she began to sometimes give good advice about how the people of Dol Amroth felt, or what they thought of something that their Prince had decided on.  She learned from as young as the age of eight if the prices of certain things were too high and the merchants and people alike were complaining, or if there was some need that had not yet reached her father’s ears, and she would often bring these tales up to her father and eldest brother to tell them of what the people in the city wanted.

Lothiriel settled into a place in the training rooms, following her brothers to learn the ways of the sword, and no one among the masters there saw any strangeness in it, for they were often under attack from the pirates of Umbar, and it was a worthy pursuit for all among the ruling line of Dol Amroth to know how to defend their home.  Lothiriel was a quick student, and she enjoyed the sword far more than the more quiet pursuits that she also studied.  Before long, she was often challenging Amrothos, five years her senior, and winning against him in the training bouts.  She was nimble and saw the patterns in others’ moments well, and she was also full of a simmering resentment that she did not have as many choices in what she could do as her brothers seemed to which fueled her on.

In those years, Lothiriel also began to learn to ride, and she took to the horse with ease.  Riding gave her a sense of freedom that she had once looked to from the sea, but when she rode on the great cliffs above Dol Amroth, she could watch for people coming in all directions from a safer place.  The view was incredible, stretching far to the sea in the south and west, and far inland in other directions, including being able to sea the road well after where it crossed the borders of their lands.  From this vantage, she was able to see into what seemed like distant lands and tell herself stories about what it might be like there.  She could also see if there were riders approaching from other parts of Gondor, especially of interest to her if the roads bore her cousin to Dol Amroth because Faramir took her seriously in a way that her older brothers did not.

When she had been nine years of age, her cousin had come for a long visit without his older brother.  It had been the first time that someone who was actually an adult had sat with her and listened to what she had to say in full.  He was older than her eldest brother, but he gave her more stock it seemed than all of her brothers combined.  Faramir worked with her in the training rooms as well, showing her tricks for someone light and quick on their feet.  In that moment, she wanted little else than to be like her older cousin, and be able to ride out with his patrols of Gondor.

When the war began, Lothiriel was frustrated that she was not allowed to ride forth with her brothers, nor was she allowed to join her Aunt Ivriniel on the boats that harassed the coastal forces of the enemy.  She was instead relegated to aiding in the halls of healing, a noble task, but one she knew was not suited to her talents.  She was surprised a bit that even her brothers and her teachers had argued with her parents that she would be best suited elsewhere, but she was the youngest and the only girl, and they wanted her somewhere comparatively safe.  Under this rule by her father, Lothiriel silently rankled.  She did not want to sit safe while her brothers and cousin were putting themselves in danger, and she did not understand why her father could not see that she was just as capable as her brothers.  She was an adult now, and fully capable of joining a troop in defense of her city and country.

Like she had watched the sea as a young girl, Lothiriel now watched the roads approaching Dol Amroth from Minas Tirith for riders.  For now, they were the bearers of the most important news.  Sometimes it was simple things:  Was there information about something?  Did they have any supplies to share?  Sometimes it was simply missives on the proceeding of the war, and sometimes it was more worrying things like the fall of Osgiliath followed by its recapture, and later, the sad news of Boromir’s death.  Lothiriel had never been close to her older cousin, but she knew that Faramir would be saddened by the news, and she felt for him.  In that time, Lothiriel lived between these missives.  The closest thing to the war that she had been allowed to do was to help her father with logistics, and while healing was important, she felt more helpful with logistics.

She discovered that while she had found her lessons on such things boring as a child, she had a bit of a talent for the actual work of logistics.  It was not too dissimilar from listening to the needs of the people of the city as a child.  She could easily do some of the maths involved in her head where her father would write out simple things on paper, and so, when she worked with the logistics, they were prepared faster.  It was the first time that she saw her father really realize that she was better than average at something and look at her with the sort of deep respect that she saw him give her brothers and her cousin.  She loved her father, and she knew that he bore great love for her as well, but until the moment where he looked at her and nodded gravely over a plan of action to move supplies, she had not thought that he would ever see her as anything other than his darling youngest child to be protected.

When the call for all riders and bearers of arms of the realm to come to the aid of Minas Tirith in the final days of the war came, Lothiriel volunteered herself to go with her father and brothers to aid in the houses of healings and with logistics in the city.  Her father hesitated to allow her to join them, but even he knew that the desperate call meant that Minas Tirith needed all possible hands, and he also knew that Dol Amroth was in capable hands between her mother and her Aunt Ivriniel.  Lothiriel was relieved when he did not countermand her statement that she would join him and her brothers.  She had never been to Minas Tirith before as her cousin had always come to visit them in Dol Amroth, but she wanted to be useful, and she worried of what she heard of her dearest cousin, her only remaining cousin now.  She wanted to be somewhere that she could help, and in Minas Tirith, there was far more need of extra hands among the healers.  She would not feel useless there, as though small jobs were being found to make her feel helpful.  She also thought that there was some chance that she might be needed inside the city as a defender, and she would be well trained for that.

The situation in Minas Tirith was far worse than Lothiriel had expected it to be.  In Dol Amroth, she had been sheltered from the war, partially because all there believed that she was the precious youngest child and only daughter who should be protected from the realities of war, but even more so because Dol Amroth was simply more protected from the harshest parts of the war than Minas Tirith and surrounding areas.  Troops that needed care from all around the area would retreat to Minas Tirith, and of course, the armies of the Enemy were fast approaching the city itself at that point.  There were warriors who bore all wounds imaginable, and many that Lothiriel would have never imagined before she saw them.

Lothiriel had a calm head under pressure though, running hither and yon and carrying messages and organizing.  The healers were in dire need of better organization, and even with her help, they were not well suited to it.  She fell into the job of triaging patients, figuring out how desperate their need for assistance was and placing them into different regions of care based on that.  The least hurt and the ones with simple illnesses were placed under the care of apprentice healers, who could stitch up a simple gash just fine and administer standard medicines.  Most of the rest of the injuries that she saw went to the younger and mid level healers, with enough training to do most things, but who were overwhelmed by the worst injuries and infections.  Those were the sole domain of the most experienced and wise among the healers.  

She often saw Faramir in passing, and there was a shadow that hung over her cousin that she wished she could help ease, but he was busy, and even when she did see him for long enough to exchange a few words, he would not tell her of anything that she could work on.  Her uncle by marriage was rarely seen, and she heard worrying whispers among the people that the Steward was not well in mind or body after the death of his elder son.

When the assault breached the city walls, Lothiriel took up her sword to defend the halls of the healers, for if any place within the city needed to be kept safe, it was where their wounded were preserved.  She saw fighting that day, and her training served her well, better in fact than that of many of the other guards of the Houses of Healing, but she did not know of the ending of the fight for many days for she was among those in the halls, though with nothing terribly major in comparison to others.  When one of the great stones had been catapulted into the city, a piece of falling masonry had hit her in the head and arm, leaving great gashes there.  She had continued to fight for at least another hour until one among the healers had pulled her away so that another guard could take her place and her wounds could be cleaned and dressed.  To the great frustration of the young healer assigned to her section of the hall though, despite the dressing on her head, she kept trying to get up and help the others around her, until he gave her a sleeping draught to carry her through the first section of the healing process.  It meant that she missed the final stages of the battle, and as she would learn later, her uncle by marriage attempting to bring Faramir with him to his death.

The crowning of the king was something that Lothiriel had not thought to see in her lifetime, and even if it had happened in her lifetime, she had expected to hear of it from Dol Amroth.  She saw the look on Faramir’s face after he was reconfirmed as the Steward, and she knew that her cousin had handed all the loyalty of his heart to this King.  She could understand though, King Elessar held a certain royalty about him that made all want to follow him, and he had healed those who needed it without any need for repayment.  She would have followed the King either way, but seeing how Faramir looked on him with great loyalty, she knew that she too would follow him with a loyalty brought about by her cousin’s.  She felt a certain sort of loyalty of her own, knowing that King Elessar had brought Faramir forth from darkness when the wisest healers of Minas Tirith thought that he might be lost to it, and she loved Faramir as she did her own brothers, so for that she was grateful.

When her father was to return to Dol Amroth, Lothiriel hesitated.  She missed her home, but the freedom to help and to fight and to do important work that she had found in Minas Tirith was something that she wanted desperately to maintain, and so Lothiriel chose to stay for a time longer to help with the court and the logistics leading up to the arrival of King Elessar’s Queen.  She figured that she would decide after that if she should stay yet longer, or if she was ready to, at last, return to Dol Amroth, but she suspected that for all that she missed the sea, the draw of the people who came through Minas Tirith would be too great for her to resist.


End file.
